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Forms of Polyphonic Communication in John Ashbery's Poetry

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Forms of Polyphonic Communication in John Ashbery's Poetry “That you too were the I”: Forms of polyphonic communication in John Ashbery’s poetry Elina Siltanen Pro Gradu Thesis English philology Department of English University of Turku April 2008 TURUN YLIOPISTO Englannin kielen laitos / Humanistinen tiedekunta SILTANEN, ELINA: “That you too were the I”: Forms of polyphonic communication in John Ashbery’s poetry Pro gradu -tutkielma, 114 s. Englantilainen filologia Huhtikuu 2008 --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Tarkastelen tutkimuksessani amerikkalaisen John Ashberyn (1927–) runoudessa ilmenevää moniäänisyyttä. Runoutta pidetään yleensä yksiäänisenä puheena, kun taas romaanin ajatellaan erityisesti Mihail Bahtinin vaikutuksesta olevan luonnostaan moniääninen kirjallisuudenlaji. Ashberyn postmoderni runous haastaa tämän käsityksen. Ashbery tunnetaan vakiintuneita runouskäsityksiä vastaan kirjoittavana avantgarde-runoilijana. Pääasiallisina tutkimuskohteinani ovat Ashberyn pitkä runoelma nimeltä ”Litany” (1979) sekä lyhyiden runojen valikoima Your Name Here (2000). Vertailukohtana tarkastelen Ashberyn yhdessä James Schuylerin kanssa kirjoittamaa romaania A Nest of Ninnies (1969). Teoreettisena pohjana on käytetty Ashberyä käsittelevän muun tutkimuksen lisäksi muun muassa jälkistrukturalistisiin teorioihin liittyviä ajatuksia pronominien vaikutuksesta siihen miten lukija muodostaa käsityksen subjektiivisesta läsnäolosta runossa. Ashbery käyttää persoonapronomineja ilman selkeitä viittaussuhteita. Viittaussuhteiden hämärtymisen ja fragmentaarisuuden vuoksi Ashberyn runoja pidetään usein vaikeina, eikä niistä ole helppo löytää yhtä selkeää aihetta. Hajanaisuus on kuitenkin motivoitua, koska juuri se mahdollistaa moniäänisyyden ja avoimen tekstin, joka voi sisältää monia merkityksiä. Kun runossa ei ole yhden puhujan hallitsevaa ääntä, lukijan rooli merkitysten muodostajana nousee keskeiseksi. ”Litany” on selkeästi metatekstuaalinen runo, jossa fiktiivinen taso sekoittuu runouden, taiteen ja kritiikin mahdollisuuksien pohdintaan. Runo hahmottelee uudenlaista, moniäänistä teorian ja runouden rajoja purkavaa kommunikaation muotoa. Toisen persoonan pronominien voidaan runossa usein ajatella puhuttelevan lukijaa. Your Name Here -kokoelmassa puolestaan toisen persoonan pronominipositiot määrittyvät usein tietyiksi henkilöhahmoiksi runojen maailmassa, ja pronominipositioiden kautta runoissa rakentuu moniäänisiä dialogeja määrittymättömien henkilöhahmojen välille. Näin lukijan huomio suunnataan ensisijaisesti kommunikaation ja arkipäivän kielenkäytön kliseiden sävyihin ja asiayhteyksiin pikemminkin kuin yksittäisten lausumien sisältöön. A Nest of Ninnies -romaani toimii näennäisestä dialogisuudestaan huolimatta ennen kaikkea yksiäänisesti, sillä romaanin yksiulotteisten henkilöhahmojen esittämiä ajatuksia hallitsee parodioimaan pyrkivä kertojanääni. Ashberyn runojen ja romaanin tarkasteleminen osoittaa, että käsitys runoudesta väistämättä yksiäänisenä ja romaanista moniäänisenä ei ole kaikilta osin ongelmaton. Moniääninen, monimerkityksinen runo voi tarjota toiselle itsenäisen aseman. Asiasanat: Ashbery, John; kirjallisuus -- Yhdysvallat; lyriikka -- runot -- minä; romaani; postmoderni; avantgarde TABLE OF CONTENTS 1. Introduction ...........................................................................................................1 2. Ashbery’s use of voice as a postmodern phenomenon: Literary historical conditions..................................................................................................................9 2.1. The beginnings of postmodernist poetry in New York...................................13 2.1.1. The New York School of poetry and new styles of writing .....................15 2.1.2. “Seldom questioned”: Against the poetry of the establishment in the 1950s ........................................................................................................................20 2.2. “The fuss seemed justified”: Later connections and writing styles.................28 2.2.1. “The poets of the future”: The fragmentation of voice in Ashbery and Language poetry ..............................................................................................31 2.2.2. ‘The templates’: Disjunction and attention to literary conventions..........37 3. “ Make you wish you were in it ”: Indeterminate voices and poetry as a critical immersion in the present in ‘Litany’ ........................................................................42 3.1. “For someone like me”: Establishing indeterminate presences ......................43 3.2. “Whom should I refer you to”: The absence of a continuous position............47 3.2.1. Changes in the speaker position and the role of naming..........................50 3.2.2. The importance of address: Blurring the boundaries between you and I ..54 3.3. “New criticism”: Metatextual discourse and the present moment...................59 3.3.1 The interrelations of different voices: Constructing a metatextual consciousness ..................................................................................................60 3.3.2. Uncertain attitudes and multiple meanings .............................................63 3.4. The poem and reader in communication: Poetry as criticism in ‘Litany’........66 4. Flexible pronouns and conversing voices: Exploring communication in Your Name Here ........................................................................................................................71 4.1. Narrativity and the use of third person...........................................................74 4.1.1. Narratives and prose effects....................................................................77 4.1.2. The voice of history: Third persons and proper names............................78 4.2. Dialogical poems ..........................................................................................83 4.2.1. The you as a dialogical position..............................................................84 4.3. Generality, particularity, and the social voice ................................................89 4.4. ‘Your Name Here’: From solitariness to communication...............................92 5. Polyphony and the reader’s position.....................................................................99 5.1. “No one word proves the truth”: Constructing provisional meanings...........101 5.2. The inherently polyphonic novel? The case of A Nest of Ninnies .................106 5.3. “It is you who made this”: The eminence of the reader...............................111 BIBLIOGRAPHY .................................................................................................115 Finnish Summary ..................................................................................................121 1 1. Introduction The body is what this is all about and it disperses In sheeted fragments, all somewhere around But difficult to read correctly since there is No common vantage point, no point of view Like the “I” in a novel. And in truth No one never saw the point of any. (‘No Way of Knowing’, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror : 56) In the above passage from the poem ‘No Way of Knowing’, John Ashbery makes a point which could easily be read as pertaining to most of his poetry: there is no common point of view, no single stance from which all perceptions and feelings emanate. “The body” – a material presence – should be “what this is all about”, but any presence there might be in the poem is dispersed in fragments of borrowed speech and manifested through variant personal pronouns with no obvious referents. And just as this blunt statement starts to seem perplexing, even to leave the reader without anything to go by, another claim follows: “And in truth / No one never saw the point of any.” There is, in fact, no need for a “common vantage point”, the speaker of the poem assures the readers, using a double negative, as if wanting to emphasize this rather questionable, possibly ironic, view. When this passage is read as if it referred to itself as a poem rather than as a general comment referring to a phenomenon that is observable outside the text, the poem appears to deny its own focalization and unity, the possibility of a unified speaker or a clearly identifiable self governing the text, and raises the question of the necessity of such a “vantage point”. Having read the aforequoted excerpt as if it represented an important aspect of much of Ashbery’s poetry, I have already made certain assumptions, most importantly that there is, behind these statements too, a speaker who utters them. Obviously, we are accustomed to seeing the point for “a common vantage point”. The speaker of ‘No Way of Knowing’ sees novels as a matter of the single observer or self, the I, but as far as novels are concerned, they are often understood as being polyphonic and lacking a single voice, especially through Bakhtin’s ([1981] 1983; 1984) theory. Poetry, on the other hand, is often regarded as the most subjective of literary genres. We are inclined to conceive of poetry as self-expression, the discourse of a single persona and voice. For his part, Bakhtin ([1981] 1983: 285) sees poetry as “a pure and direct expression of [the poet’s] own intention”; it is a literary genre in 2 which all discourses and meanings are subjugated under a single voice. Ashbery’s passage becomes all the more controversial and, perhaps also “difficult to read correctly” as the poem suggests, when we have trouble constructing
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